ATK consumes a lot of battery? According to my battery info page (on a Nexus One), my phone was last unplugged for 3h 45m, and ATK doesn't appear in the consumption list at all. The only way ATK can be responsible for an appreciable amount of battery power draw is if its draw is rolled into something else. I would not expect it to be charged to the display (which took 78% of the battery use on that capture); the next highest energy use was by Android System -- which could contain ATK's use, but the system charge was only 6%. Nothing else in the list looks related.

Cheap is nice. Short term memory -- too close to home for anyone over 40, but one day isn't bad. How fast is it to access, and how large is it relative to Si storage? Those may both be answered in TFA, but I'm too lazy to check. +1 Honesty?

If this is as fast as traditional large storage formats, and it doesn't take considerably more space, it could be interesting to see this applied to swap space or/tmp type storage... especially if the 1 day reliability can be extended through a refresh cycle.

The Myth Busters episode regarding this is several years old. Fingerprint scanning technology has improved rapidly in the mean time.

Like everything, it's hackable if you know the full details, but it gets harder each year, and even when Myth Busters used photo copies and copper etchings to get past them, there were commercially available scanners that these techniques could not fool. I have no reason to believe Myth Busters was aware of the bleeding edge technology, but I do know the technology existed then and is improved today.

No doubt, many open source projects compile with many warnings. Not that this is an excuse, but open source projects do have a bit of an uphill battle on this front, as there are many compilers out there, and unless they have a build farm to check against them all with, they're not likely to fix everything. [Again, not to make an excuse or minimize your statement -- most warnings I've seen in open source code are easy to fix and not compiler dependent.]

I would imagine its fair to guess that Microsoft builds their OS using the same compiler that Visual Studio uses. Ever work in that environment? Perhaps there are ways to elicit better warning output, but the default (at least when using the UI) is that many warnings that GCC (and other similar class compilers) output, Visual Studio lets go without a peep. That can make code compile warning-free, but in no way is the number of warnings a promise of comparability to quality of what gets produced, eh?

The uneducated are indeed the target market for schools which lack acceptable accreditation. The definition of educated vs. uneducated is not the same as "went to school" vs. "didn't go to school". You should apply a little insight of your own before choosing to get snarky.

I think a plausible possibility is some app you installed did provide these schools with your contact data, but not directly. Instead, through some affiliate website where the site owner gets paid as if you had gone to that site and provided the information/sales call request yourself.

Yes, schools like this prey on the uneducated and exist only to relieve them of their money, but I wouldn't be too quick to assume the schools know that your information was not provided to them legitimately -- especially if it's more than one place that contacted you like this.

Apple provided the API on the iPhone that allows their app to collect the data without any direct decision from the phone's user. It seems to me that "Apple gives them the information" applies, and will continue to apply until users must take specific action (beyond simply installing the app) to allow the data to leave their device.

My question on Android is : how can google not release it under GPL as they are using a linux kernel ?

The parts of their system that are linked against other GPL modules -are- GPL. There are other parts (such as Google Maps, etc.) which are not. GPL is not the virus M$ would have you believe it is; it's very easy to create a system that has plenty of GPL along side plenty of other licenses, all coexisting peacefully.